It Shouldn’t Matter Whether Kamala Harris Is a Parent
5 min read
What makes someone a parent? It’s not the most pressing question facing the country. But in the days since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, Republicans have lobbed a personal and notably misogynistic attack against the vice president: that she’s unfit to be president because she doesn’t have biological children. “The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her,” Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer, posted on X on Sunday. Blake Masters, a venture capitalist running to represent Arizona in the U.S. House, wrote on Wednesday: “If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations?” It’s not a new argument. Masters was defending a recently resurfaced clip of J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, which aired on Fox News in 2021. “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats,” Vance said, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made … Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigeg, AOC … how is it that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”
Supporters have rushed to Harris’s defense with the obvious rebuttal: She is, in fact, a highly involved stepparent to Cole and Ella, the children of her husband, Doug Emhoff. Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin, even chimed in on Wednesday: “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I … She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present.”
As her stepkids might say, this is Momala we’re talking about. The one who calls them her “endless source of love and pure joy”; who posted a photo of Ella and herself, beaming, when Ella graduated from college in 2021; who officiated Cole’s wedding in October. In an interview with TheNew York Times, Ella described her biological parents and Harris as “a unit, like a three-person parenting squad.” In the same interview, Cole recalled a photo of Harris looking stern during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing, posted online with the caption “I’d hate to have to look at that face and explain why I’m late for curfew.” He told the Times that he remembered thinking: “I’ve literally had to do that.”
Clearly, Harris knows what it’s like to parent. I don’t doubt that she’s experienced the kind of selfless love that comes from putting kids first; that she’s stayed up worrying about her stepchildren, what they’re going through, what their futures will be like; that she has a stake in the world passed down to them. I’m glad that many people have been able to admire her devotion without dwelling on the detail that it didn’t require childbirth or shared DNA. And I’m glad that plenty have pointed out several U.S. presidents who didn’t have biological kids, including George Washington. But frankly, when it comes to whether Harris would make a good president? None of this matters.
No politician can have personal experience with every issue they take up. We know this. You can support abortion rights without having had an abortion; you can support veterans without having fought in the military; you can call for firearm restrictions without ever having lost a loved one to gun violence. It can be powerful to hear from leaders who have lived these realities—who know that politics isn’t a game, and who have a vested interest in laws being enacted. It is also powerful to hear from leaders with a clear and principled vision of what needs to change, and a record of getting it done. The first—intimate knowledge—hardly guarantees the second.
Case in point: Having kids does not appear to make you a champion of child welfare. Donald Trump has five children, all blood-related; his administration also separated more than 5,000 children from their parents under its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, and as many as 2,000 of those kids have yet to be reunited with their parents. Vance himself voted last month to block legislation that would guarantee national access to in-vitro fertilization—many couples’ only hope for having a biological child. (The actress Jennifer Aniston, who has spoken openly about her past fertility struggles, wrote in an Instagram story: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”)
The GOP has a history of pro-family branding, but states led by Republicans tend to provide parents with less support—paid leave, affordable child care, universal preschool, expanded Medicaid—and have higher child-poverty and infant-mortality rates. “Cat lady” Harris, meanwhile, led the Biden administration’s push for expanded child tax credits. When she ran in the 2019 presidential primary, she proposed a particularly ambitious six-month paid-family-leave policy—which would have included workers caring for domestic partners, kids harmed by domestic violence, and even “chosen family.”
That’s the thing. Every day, Americans look after one another in a million different ways. Even if you do care what a politician knows firsthand, the reality is that you don’t need a child—biological or adopted or brought into your world through marriage—to be a caregiver. Maybe you’ve nursed an elderly parent, waking to turn them every two hours so they don’t get bedsores. Maybe you’ve watched over a spouse with dementia, to ensure that they don’t leave the house alone. Maybe you’ve picked up your neighbors’ children from school when they got stuck at work, or brought your siblings groceries when they were sick. When I was growing up, my single mom’s best friend was around every week—cooking Shabbat dinner, playing with my brother and me, bringing us little gifts or funny Photoshopped pictures of our dog. She didn’t have kids of her own. After she died, in 2021, loved one after loved one appeared at a Zoom memorial and raised a hand to speak; everyone seemed to have a story like mine, about how this woman had shown up for them.
To think that only parents understand what it means to care for others is to misunderstand this nation entirely—to ignore what so many people give and receive, what their lives are like, and what support they need. I am happy, for Harris’s family’s sake, that she is a dedicated stepmom. For this country’s sake, I couldn’t care less.
